Now only if it could have a 33% rate success in convincing other humans it was an exiled Nigerian dictator who needed some help moving his money out of the country.

Actually we do have a very small number of life tenure positions outside Academia. The most noticeable examples would be Supreme Court Judges and Members of the UK House of Lords.

The purpose of tenure is actually the holder the freedom to explore unpopular ideas and the freedom to make unpopular choices without having to worry about political consequences from the bureaucracy. Tenure in the judiciary and politics, along with separation of powers, was a practical solution to the previous abused of power under monarchy.

In academia, tenure would give the holder the same intellectual freedom as the landed gentry who where independently wealthy and not in need of an income. The Nobel Prize ($1.2 million USD) and other major academic prizes serve a similar function as tenure, but without attaching the individual to an organization.

A hundred years ago, only a small percentage of the population went to university. Academia while not exclusive to the rich, did have a much higher share of gentlemen scholars who where not in need of an income, or at least had friends in high places willing to serve as patron. The subjects themselves where also much newer, thus a PHD was not always forced to investigate an ultra specialized niche.

Then a correlation was discovered, those with university degrees tended to be set for life. A degree itself soon became almost a basic requirement for any mid-level job, so the lower classes started flooding the universities and the expectation that everybody will earn a degree. So qualification inflation started to happen, a degree is no longer enough, you need a masters or a PHD now to secure your place in the job market.

The government sets a budget for science research, and we still have a number of rich patrons and alumni donating into the system, but the ratio of research funding to university students has gone down considerably (because the student population has rapidly increased) and the ratio of PHD students to available professorships has gone up.

There are too many people chasing too few places, but it takes a generation for the lesson to be learnt, and the promise of our parents generation was that degrees where rare and near gaurentee of a successful job. The truth has always been that success often requires standing outside of the crowd, and its impossible to create a standardized formula to achieve this.

The truth is that the brain region is used for lying, it is smaller in men who admit to watching porn and larger for men who lie about it.

In women it is about the size of a coconut.

The unwritten understanding of the intelligence community is that everybody is spying on everybody else, yet nobody will actually admit to doing it.

The revelations about Angela Merkel's phone resulted in a bit of diplomatic banter and point scoring, plus a few blushed faces, but the Germans too would have been naive to believe the US wasn't trying to spy on them. Though the Germans may have been a little surprised at how good the US was at spying. However this hasn't changed the underlying alliance and trade relations between the US and the EU. A major PR flap, but no harm done.

Even if we consider enemies such as Osama Bin Laden, before the Snowdon revelations. Al-Qaeda seemed to have an understanding that the US had secret backdoor access to much of the modern digital infrastructure, even if they didn't understand the technical details. Their counter strategy was to organize themselves using pre-digitial methods, using secret face-to-face meetings and hand couriered letters.

The law is nothing more than a threat that the government will use all its available power against you should you violate its written law. The call by John Kerry to "man up" and face trial is nothing more than an admission of defeat by the CIA that they are unable or unwilling to secretly kill, capture or rendition him back to the USA without creating a martyr out of him. The US has already invoked it full power, he is being actively monitored, they have revoked his passport and have pulled alot of diplomatic strings to prevent him traveling outside Russia. Snowdon has effectively beat them at their own game.

A Snowdon trial would not reveal any truth that is not already known. The only thing to be achieved by a "trial" would be to place Snowdon in the custody of the US government and allow them to keep incommunicado and prevent him access to the media. His revelations have all been about putting the US government itself on trial, by exposing the evidence to the court of public opinion.

The irony is that the US is a nation that can easily kill an armed "suspected terrorist" from half way round the world, with just a touch of a button from a drone, yet still has trouble killing a man strapped to a chair.

The top watches tend to be good (unless they are laden with diamonds) but the 1k-5k range is riddled with rather crap watches, often with mass produced innards from far cheaper models. This range you don't pay for the craftman ship, you pay for the brand name.

Even in the high end you got to check what you are buying, name, jewels or mechanics.

The point is that tech advances and as you yourself admit, quartz is better.

The function of a time piece is to keep the time as accurate as possible and you admit that cheaper quartz watches do a better job then this particular mechanical watch. There are mechanical time pieces that do much better. So this time piece in question has no other function then being an expensive bit of jewelry.

There are some very good mechanical watches, Tag Heuer is not amongst them, it is a hipster thingy, more about flash (look at how much I cost) then actual value for money.

Wear what you like but please don't pretend that 1 minute out of date in a month is anything then mediocre.

It takes an incredibly narrow minded and anal personality to come up with situations 99% of customers will never encounter and therefor conclude that because 1% might encounter them in a life time, an entire line of products is useless.

Oh no, a product isn't perfect for everybody! USELESS!

And you suddenly learn to write proper code and 99% of your debugging needs disappear simply because you have learned to write code correctly and consistently.

I see to many code monkeys who can't work consistently, who rely on an IDE to safe their asses and so when it comes crunch time, they can't handle anything because nobody is holding their hands.

Friends who are not my friends apparently want me to stop finding meaningful results.

DuckDuckDon't.

How does that work? What database dump requires an executable? All the ones I know simply create a very large human readable text file.

Who the fuck would execute an executable from a bunch of hackers who claim to have hacked a financial site related to a whole digital currency with said currency residing on the same machine as the one you are running the exe on.

And I thought people that ran kitten.scr.exe were idiots.

First off, I get what you are saying and it seems pretty obvious to me.

But now for the hard and funny until you think about it, then you have to laugh so you don't cry.

Here it is:

And is your post part of such a program?

Where does the dis-information begin/end?

No I don't think you are, the shill accounts are rather obvious to stop, no real posting history, no jokes, no human observations, just shill posts. But when the lying has spread so far, how does a normal person know what is true and what isn't anymore.

And if you ask, why would they do that? So ordinary people give up because they just can't deal with it anymore. The feeling I am having for the last year.